


Static Codes

by GingerAlchemy



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Miscommunication, Missing Scene, Mutual Pining, Road Trips, Seasons 1-7, Stakeout, Texas, UST, many a car is driven, the gulf coast continues to haunt me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:29:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21844465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GingerAlchemy/pseuds/GingerAlchemy
Summary: He hasn’t asked her where they’re going, which is good, because Scully doesn’t know. All she knows is that if she drives long enough, she’ll get the nerve to say what she needs to say. If enough miles pass underneath them, eventually they have to be changed by those miles. Eventually, she has to become a braver woman.(Mulder and Scully contemplate stopping the car.)
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 5
Kudos: 33





	Static Codes

**Author's Note:**

> Why didn't msr kiss in season 4? Well if you ask me, it's because if you spend enough time in a car with someone, you will eventually blurt out every secret except the ones that are actually important. (and because SOMEONE doesn't know how to write a consistent storyline but we're not naming names here. Is it me, or is it Cough Coughter? Who could say.)

  
I.

It’s the early days of their partnership when Scully decides that she wants to be the one driving. The role comes naturally to her, as the designated driver among her group of friends in college. Back then, she always knew exactly how much to drink so that she could be sober in an hour. She chalked it up to the medical training, but most of her friends were med students too. Really, Scully’s just good at planning. Well, she was good at it. Back then.

She sometimes worries that she’s losing her edge. This weekend, for instance, she’d planned to take a long bubble bath, drink one and a half glasses of wine, and finish the newest novel in a series about a disgraced lawyer working to prove himself again—she picked up the series just pre-Mulder and has never opened the last book. 

But instead of relaxing in her tub, she finds herself trapped in a car with someone who pays more attention to the movie he saw on TV last night than to the road in front of them. 

“You would have loved it, Scully,” he says. “There was this redhead on there. The monster picked her up and then she stabbed it in the neck with her nail file. Reminded me of someone I know.”

He looks over at her with a lazy grin, waiting for her to take the bait. She arches one eyebrow and says nothing. His grin widens. He keeps looking at her. The road curves up ahead of them, dark trees on either side. 

“Mulder, for God’s sake.” She gestures in front of them. “Pay attention.”

He heaves a dramatic sigh and turns the steering wheel just in time to take the curve, a movement that looks careless, like he’s driving based on his other senses and he knew about the curve all along. 

Somehow this annoys Scully even more than his disinterest in the road.

“So you wouldn’t stab a swamp monster in the neck with your nail file?” he asks.

“Well, I guess it depends on whether that’s the only weapon available.”

His answering smile makes his eyes crinkle at the corners. “Yeah, you would have been more prepared I bet. Gun under your pillow.”

“Dresser drawer,” she says. It has its own spot underneath her oldest bra. She probably uses the gun more than the bra, now that she thinks about it. Maybe the gun should go on top. She pulls her mind back to the car, which Mulder is now driving with one hand while eating sunflower seeds with the other.

“So is that who we’re hunting?” she asks. “The swamp monster?”

It’s a cheap shot, and they both know it, but Mulder nods seriously.

“Yeah Scully, we’re hunting the creature from the black lagoon. Better be especially careful—I’ve heard he likes redheads.”

He winks at her. Something about the wink tips her off balance. It isn’t the wink really—it’s the way he delivered it. The laugh trying to emerge from behind it. The warm intensity of his gaze. She feels the tips of her ears trying to redden and stomps on the feeling as hard as she can, thinking of her clunkiest heels.

He must be able to tell that in the split-second pause before she put the _Scully_ back on her face, he caught her off guard, because he lets the laugh escape softly and looks away out the left window. Somehow, this is even worse.

She’s never entirely sure what he’s trying to accomplish when he teases her. Plenty of men have flirted with her before. She understands what it looks like. She also understands the source of her burning ears. Probably it has a lot to do with Mulder’s jawline, his sad eyes, and the absolute and unwarranted certainty with which he conducts his life. It isn’t news. It does kind of make her want to put a label on her own forehead: Dana Scully—Sucker. It hasn’t affected her beyond that, though.

What she doesn’t understand is why, after he tries to tug her pigtails and she takes the bait or doesn’t take it, laughs at him or sighs, he sometimes goes quiet and reverent like she’s telling him the meaning of the universe instead of reminding him to look at the road.

She glances at his profile. His strong jaw contrasts with the dark trees out the window. It’s hard to tell, but she thinks his mouth is still shaped like a smile. Spotting a stray sunflower seed in his collar, right at the base of his neck, she has to stop herself from reaching out to remove it.

“Now who’s staring?” he asks pleasantly.

She shoots him a distinctly unimpressed look, letting the silence stretch for a moment longer than is comfortable for either of them. This part comes naturally to her—Scully has many years of practice intimidating men. The problem is that Mulder doesn’t look intimidated. She can’t read that look, but she’s fairly sure it’s closer to intrigue on the sliding scale of Fox Mulder Expressions (it’s a small scale, but the subtleties make all the difference). She clears her throat.

“You had a sunflower seed. Right there.”

She reaches over quickly to pluck it from his collar. He shivers just a little when her fingers brush the back of his neck by accident. Cold hands. Everyone tells her that. Now his collar is rumpled, but at this point, fixing it would take a level of cool unconcern that Scully isn’t sure she’s reached just yet, so she lets it be.

“Eyes on the road, Scully.” His voice is maybe softer than it should be for the context.

Scully crosses her arms and hides her disloyal hands in the crooks of her elbows.

“They always are.”

  
II.

Scully’s driving to his place when her cell phone rings, a harsh trill up the scale that she’s come to associate with late night stakeouts, bad gas station corn dogs, root beer from the 24/7 convenience store, and his scratchy, half-asleep voice on the other end. 

She sighs and picks up the phone. Out the window, pine trees and McDonald’s signs litter the side of the road and it doesn’t matter where she is; this is Anywhere, America.

“Hey, it’s me,” she says. She yawns halfway through her words. It’s only three in the afternoon, but she caught a movie last night on TV and stayed up too late by accident. Possibly, his habits are rubbing off on her. “Listen, I’m on the way to your place already, so don’t tell me you’re out in the woods somewhere because I’ll go right back home.”

“Dana?” The voice on the other end is confused, feminine, and definitely not Mulder. 

“Ellen?” Scully says. She hasn’t spoken to her friend in a few months and wasn’t expecting a call from her. She spares half a second to wonder why she only ever expects calls from Mulder anymore and then files that thought neatly away in the ever-growing file cabinet of Things Dana Scully Does Not Dwell On. 

“Yes, it’s Ellen. Sounds like you’re…busy, though. I can call you back later if you want.” Scully can practically hear Ellen’s eyebrows rising.

“Ha ha,” she says. “No, I’m not busy.” She scans the highway for somewhere to pull over. Settles on a 7/11 parking lot. Mulder can wait a few minutes. Anyway, it’s been harder and harder to spend time with Ellen after the birth of her son. “So how have you been?”

“Good.” Ellen’s tone still sounds suspicious, but Ellen likes to focus on the mundane before circling back around to the questions she really wants to ask—an investigative technique Scully both admires and hates. “Bobby and I just celebrated our fifth anniversary, if you can believe that. Still doesn’t seem like five years.”

“Yeah, seems like we should still be in undergrad passing notes about that cute physics professor. Do you remember that?”

Ellen laughs delightedly. “Oh, I’d almost forgotten. What was his name, Sanders, Samson? Something macho like that.”

“Saunders,” Scully fills in. “You said you were going to sleep with him.”

“And then I went and slept with the TA instead.”

“Well, I guess it worked out okay in the end.”

“A kid and a house later,” Ellen agrees. “Hey, Dana, when are you going to settle down with someone nice?”

They’ve had this conversation so many times it’s an inside joke at this point. It doesn’t bother Scully coming from friends who know how much she values her career. Ellen isn’t Bill, asking her in earnest over bad coffee, reminding her why she rarely attends family reunions. Still, there’s a pause before Scully answers, a breath in which she carefully files away one version of the future. 

“Maybe when you stop setting me up with insurance salesmen.” She lets herself smile into the receiver. 

“Hey, Sam wasn’t so bad.”

“No,” Scully agrees. “He was just doing his job when he tried to sell me life insurance over wine and steak.”

Ellen laughs. “Okay, okay. But they haven’t all been bad.”

Sully inspects her nails. She frowns as she realizes that she still has unidentifiable gunk underneath her thumbnail from the latest excursion into the woods of West Virginia. “No. They haven’t been bad.” 

“You sound skeptical.”

“I’ve been told.” 

In all honesty, most of the people Ellen’s set her up with _haven’t_ been bad. They’ve been fine, perfectly attractive, most of them vaguely charming in one way or another. Even the insurance salesman was…tall, at least. She once slept with a James from Delaware who liked film noir and tried to woo her with his knowledge of old true crime stories. She went on a third (third!) date with a Marcus from D.C. who analyzed finances for a cable company but made up for it with a goofy, good-natured sense of humor and a Labrador retriever named Sally. She had a pleasant date with a Michael, who made bad jokes, bought her cider after cider, and kissed her on the cheek at the end of the evening. 

All of these men were good, fine, perfectly acceptable. Scully broke things off with every one of them. Sometimes in the middle of a conversation about favorite music or the best tourist sites nearby, Scully thinks that there must be a sheet-thin glass wall between her and every one of the people she’s ever tried to date. Possibly between her and every other human on the planet. They can still see and hear each other, and they can put their hands to the glass like Kirk and Spock in the Star Trek movie she saw years ago. It’s a good imitation of romance. 

“Dana?”

“Yep, still here.”

“Are you really? I could hear you thinking. So, who was that you were trying to talk to earlier, huh?”

Ah, the million-dollar question. Scully knew she wouldn’t be able to avoid this. 

“Oh, no one, just work. We have an investigation going on and I was about to bring over some files.”

“To his apartment.”

“Yep.” She pops the p. Waits for it.

“Is this tall, dark, and mysterious just-work?”

“That’s the one.” Scully props the phone between her shoulder and her cheek, regretting that she ever told Ellen about Mulder. Regretting especially the two rum and cokes it had taken for her to admit to Ellen that she found him attractive. She worries her left thumbnail between her right thumb and index finger, trying to scrape out the dirt. Hopefully dirt. She considers going into the 7/11 for an iced tea and a nail file. Do they sell nail files at a 7/11?

“You haven’t talked about him in a while,” Ellen says. Her tone suggests that she’s waiting for details, that they’re walking to the science building weighed down by heavy backpacks and clunky shoes, exchanging stories about last weekend. 

Scully considers a few replies. She considers _oh you know, they’ve been bugging my phone a lot recently._ She considers _yeah, we’re having a clandestine love affair in the sewers of DC._ She considers _well, last week we killed a liver-eating mutant together, but I still don’t know his favorite color._

She settles on, “There’s not a lot to say.”

The silence that comes next is long and impressive. It hangs precariously over Scully’s head. It is the same shape and size as every awkward silence after every ill-considered wine-and-steak question she’s ever been asked. _Dana, have you ever killed a man? Dana, have you ever been in love?_

Ellen chuckles. It unexpectedly gives her a pang of homesickness for Mulder’s low, genuine laugh after she made fun of him last week for reading out her lucky numbers. She hates this conversation a lot.

“Okay,” Ellen says. “Don’t tell me.”

“I’m serious, Ellen. There’s nothing to tell. It’s all work stuff, so it’s mostly confidential. There’s just a lot to go over, so sometimes we work weekends.”

“I thought you said this was going to be a temporary assignment. Now you’re working weekends for it?”

“I’ll admit, it’s taking a little longer than I’d anticipated.” She pauses. “It’s kind of becoming…an indefinite thing.” There, she’s said it.

Another silence. Another heavily implied eyebrow raise. “And you still haven’t slept with him?”

“God, Ellen. No!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t exclusively sleep with coworkers, you know. Do you want me to get kicked out of the FBI? Is that the end goal here?”

“Maybe,” Ellen laughs again. “I feel like I never see you anymore.”

“And whose decision was it to have the world’s most energetic child?”

“Touché. He’s been asking about you, you know.”

“Tell him I’ll come over to see him soon, promise.”

“Okay. Oh, that’s him now. He’s awake already, hang on.”

In the background, Scully hears an ominous crash, followed by a shout and a few noises of concern from Ellen. She can imagine the scene. A stack of books knocked off the shelf, maybe a vase, Ellen’s hands covered in flour or butter as she runs from the kitchen to the scene of the crime. Danny’s wail of protest as she carries him off. 

A moment later, a little out of breath, Ellen says, “Sorry, Dana. How about I call you back?”

“Oh yeah, that’s fine. Any time.” She checks her watch. “Well, any time after eight. Or nine, make that nine.”

“If you’re sure I won’t be interrupting anything.”

Scully laughs just once, to show that she gets the joke. _Ha ha, Dana Scully is secretly dating that man she met in a basement last year._ “I’m positive.”

“Good, because there’s someone I want you to meet next week, and he’s been asking about you for months. No excuses!”

“No excuses,” Scully agrees. She’s already running through her mental list of excuses. _I have to marinate in the bath. I have to visit my parents. I have to break Mulder out of a top-secret military base._

The phone call ends with a click. 

After a brief expedition into the 7/11, she emerges with two iced teas and no nail file. When she opens the car door, she discovers that her phone is already ringing again.

She picks it up. “Ellen?”

“No, it’s Michael Jackson.”

“Oh hey, Mulder.” She can hear her voice change tones, grow warm and familiar in a way that really terrifies her if she stops to think about it too hard. She clears her throat and pretends she’s a telephone operator. “I was just on my way to look over that file at your place. What’s up?”

“Actually, Scully, you’re not going to believe this. You should really see this in person.”

“Mulder. Are you not at your place?”

She can hear him consider how to respond to the implicit warning. She waits for the half-wounded, half-excited explanation, the verbal equivalent of puppy dog eyes. She decides not to give him the chance.

“Where are you?”

“So, remember that highway off 45, past the campsite?” He sounds relieved that she skipped the argument. Of course he does. “It’s a few miles south of that. I’ll give you the coordinates.”

Damn it. And she wore her good jeans today.

  
III.

Out the window, the streetlights loom like silent watchers. Each one appears to her right and then drifts off into the fog as they pass by. She watches the shadows at the edges of the light. Sees nothing but moths and burger wrappers on the sidewalk. 

She and Mulder aren’t talking—not because they’re fighting. Just because it’s been a long day and he insisted on driving her home, and she was too tired to argue. They’ve been carpooling lately even though his apartment is the opposite direction of hers and neither one of them is saving on gas. She thinks it’s because she was gone for long enough that now if he lets her out of his sight, he worries she might disappear again. 

She can feel his eyes boring into her from the driver’s side. She wants to turn and stare right back, to challenge him until he looks away. She wants to pick a fight about their case or about the gas. She wants him to stop inspecting her like she’s a specimen underneath the microscope. 

But by the time she’s almost worked up to saying something, they’ve arrived at her apartment building. He parks in the delivery driver spot, and they both sit there. Suddenly, she doesn’t want to go up the stairs (she could take the elevator but lately she’s been taking the three flights just to prove she still can). She doesn’t want to go unlock the door, step into the cool dark emptiness of her living room, eat refrigerated chicken from the night before as she sits alone in front of the TV. The silence never used to bother her, but now she’s taken to putting on the radio as soon as she wakes up and the TV before she goes to bed. Something about the grey static sound feels better than the sound of her own breaths. 

“Scully.”

She breathes out a sigh. “Yeah?”

“I can hear you thinking.”

“I doubt that.” She allows herself to glance at him. In the dimness of the car, half his face hides in shadow and the other half wears a tired smile. He looks like a film noir hero. No, he looks like a Picasso painting. 

“You okay?” His voice is quiet and warm. She’s heard him speak to family members of a murder victim like this. 

“Yeah. It’s late. I guess I’m just tired.”

“Guess this means you don’t want to stay up raiding graveyards with me.” 

She hates that he sounds just a little hopeful. She doesn’t think he’ll actually raid any graveyards tonight, but you can never be sure. She squints at him, and he laughs at her softly in the dark like he knew what she was thinking. Sometimes she thinks that he must. There’s a whole case file in the way that he replies to the words she never says. She looks away to trace rain spatter on the window with her index finger.

“That’s a little high school, Mulder.”

“You robbed graves in high school, Scully? I knew it.” She doesn’t have to look to tell that’s he’s delighted. “You had to have had a rebel phase.”

“This is my rebel phase.”

_This_ sounds dangerously close to _you_. She hopes he hears it and she hopes he doesn’t.  
“I don’t believe that. I want to hear more about teen punk Scully.”

Scully lets out a breath, half relief and half disappointment. “Well, high school was uneventful, mostly. I did give a guy a black eye once though.”

“What did he do? Tell a bad physics pun?”

“He used to follow me around. Poke me in the back after I told him to stop. One day he came up behind me trying to startle me. I guess it worked, because I had a fist in his face before either of us knew what was going on.”

She expects him to laugh. Melissa had laughed. Her father had laughed, she remembers with a small pang of grief. 

But Mulder is just looking at her like she’s something new, some discovery he can’t take his eyes away from. A puzzle to solve, or the moment before solving the puzzle. 

“If I could,” he says softly, and she knows that whatever comes next will probably ruin her. “If I could, I’d go back in time. Throw punches with anyone who’s ever picked on you.”

“Oh, Mulder.” She wants to laugh because she doesn’t know what else to do. She almost reaches out absentmindedly to brush the hair on his forehead like she’s checking for a fever or anything that could explain how quietly, devastatingly honest he gets at night. But she stops her hand before it can reach him. She looks back down at her lap.

“You know I can take care of myself,” she says, because it has to be said. Because that’s what she started this car ride annoyed about, and she’s not in so deep that he can just stare at her with huge earnest eyes and she’ll forget. 

But he smiles a little lopsided smile, the same species as the hospital smile from a month ago. “I know. I just. I wish I’d been there.” 

He reaches out across the gaping cavern of the drink holder between them and brushes a hand against the very back of her neck, fingers twining through the wisps of hair she failed to capture in her ponytail. He makes it seem like an afterthought, but she can feel the tingling pressure of his fingertips at her hairline. She thinks that they’ll leave burn marks. Maybe later she’ll examine her neck in the mirror, looking for evidence of him. She’ll begin the autopsy on what’s left of her objectivity. 

She levels him with a stare. “You couldn’t have been there. You were busy starting fires in Oxford if I remember correctly.”

Mulder seems to realize that he’s crossed the threshold for ways good friends touch each other, because he pulls his hand away and shrugs. “No, I mean for all of it. I wish we’d been in high school together. Gone to college together. Where were you when I was smoking too much weed and dating house fires?”

“Well.” She can’t help the smile that rises to her face. She hides it in the shadow next to her seat belt, but she thinks he can probably hear it in her voice anyway. “I’m here now.”

“Yeah.”

Scully sits there in silence for a moment. Glances at him trying to glance at her without her noticing. She has no more excuse to stay in the warm car. She gathers up her bag and coat.

“Listen, I’m going in. Do you want—I mean, there’s coffee,” she finishes, against her own better judgement. But he’s driven her home most nights this week, so it’s courtesy that inspires her, she decides. 

“I would, but I have to get back and finish that report from earlier. Wouldn’t want Skinman to bust a blood vessel tomorrow.”

Mulder has never in his life cared about a report. “Oh yeah, of course,” Scully says, church-luncheon pleasant. “I won’t keep you then.”

She opens the door, and a rush of cold air sweeps in. The breeze sends a chill across the back of her neck in stark contrast to the warmth of his fingers a moment ago. 

“See you Monday,” she says.

“Yeah. Rain check on the coffee though?” 

She smiles, feeling a little warmer. “Yeah, okay. Bye, Mulder.”

“Bye.” 

He gives a silly little wave with just the tips of his fingers, and then she closes the door and turns away towards her cold chicken alfredo and the neutral hum of a Friends episode on TV. 

Three flights of stairs later, she realizes with dawning unease that she’s still smiling.

  
IV.

They’re driving through Somewhere, Texas. Scully can tell that this is not Nowhere, Texas, because they left Nowhere, Texas behind a few hours ago. In contrast to the endless rows of pines behind them, this place opens out in all directions. The road stays the same for hours, fields of cows on one side, fields of nothing in particular on the other. But now, they’re approaching the coast. Scully can feel the change in the air—she’s gone from boiling in her own sweat to boiling in the sweat of the whole earth. 

The suit jacket came off twenty miles ago, leaving her feeling strangely bare in her tight green t-shirt. When they stopped at the last gas station so she could use the bathroom and he could buy more snacks, she caught him eyeing her arms like they were something new and hopelessly intriguing. Trying not to look. Looking anyway. This is mostly what they do these days, if she’s being honest with herself. Scully sometimes feels like her whole life is spent trying not to see things for what they are.

But today, she’s in the driver’s seat and he’s reclining in the passenger seat with his lanky limbs all stretched out and a tabloid magazine in his hands.

Neither one of them is injured, neither one of them is in mortal danger, and she privately thinks that the reports of strange lights they’re chasing this weekend will turn out to be nothing more than teenage pranks. The sun beats down on her arms. On the radio, a song about summer love keeps cutting in and out, mixed with football reports from the night before. From where she sits, there’s not a thing wrong in the world. 

“Scully, you’d never believe this. This woman claims she’s the reincarnation of Elvis.”

“We’re not going to meet her, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Aw, Scully.” He stares up at her with wide, innocent eyes. “I’d never put you through that. Not when Elvis is still alive.”

When she laughs, it comes out loud and sudden like she’d been holding it in this whole time. Maybe she has been. Their life is ridiculous. 

He’s looking at her like he wants to memorize it, and she feels something in her chest give a tug. She’s a helium balloon trying to tether herself back to earth. 

“Mulder,” she says. “Why would anyone lie about his death? That doesn’t make sense.”

“No, no, see he faked his own death. Wouldn’t you, if you were that famous? People would be following you around day and night.”

“People sometimes follow me around,” Scully says. “I haven’t faked my own death yet.”

“I’m not talking about flukemen.”

“Me neither.”

He pauses. “I’m not talking about me,” he says. 

She reads the carefully neutral uncertainty in his eyes, the silent _am I_? Sometimes Mulder’s insecurity about their friendship seems ridiculous, because it’s become increasingly obvious that she always wants him around. When she’d been assigned to a different department last year, she’d caught herself waiting outside doors for him to show up behind her. He walks into rooms, and her immediate relief surprises even her. 

But she can’t say any of that out loud, because even on a Friday afternoon, with the sun beating courage into her veins and the air conditioning blasting away her higher powers of thought, she thinks that if she opened that box, she might never get it closed again. 

So she just checks her rearview and says, carefully, “Me neither.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees his smile. It’s small and unbearably genuine. He looks out the window, taps a long finger on the glass.

“Look, Scully. I think that cow has two heads.”

It is his version of checking the rearview. They speed on through the afternoon, 75 miles per hour and nothing wrong in the world.

  
V.

Her feet do touch the pedals. But now she’s taken her heels off in the secrecy of the darkness below the steering wheel, and so it’s a stretch. They’re sitting, and sitting, and sitting. Hour five of the stakeout, and in the peaceful suburban house across the street from them, not a soul stirs. Scully thinks they might be here until Thanksgiving. She thinks they’re more likely to solve the mystery of the watery cobbler than to find an alien bounty hunter—or in fact, a criminal of any kind. 

The heating sputters and sputters and then blasts her full force in the face. She stretches her hand out to adjust the vent, but it won’t move. 

Mulder loudly eats sunflower seeds and spicy Cheetos in the seat to her right. He’s got a bag of each. She sighs. In her head, she tries to compose a grocery list, things she might need to bring to her mom’s, things she should probably buy now to avoid the inevitable rush in a few days. Does she have cranberry sauce at home? 

Something hits the side of her face. Something that feels suspiciously like the shell of a sunflower seed. She whirls to find Mulder already putting his hands in the air. 

“Mulder, I swear to God—”

“Wasn’t me!” 

She takes a deep breath. He’s getting on her last nerve lately and so it’s better if she continues to ignore him, even though she knows that this is one of two ways to guarantee his full attention. The other would involve photographic evidence of Bigfoot. 

She continues with the list. She needs turkey seasoning because Bill and Charlie will forget to bring it. 

Another missile hits her face.

“Mulder!”

She reaches out a hand blindly, and it swats his arm. He leans away as though she’d really slapped him. 

“Wasn’t me! I swear. Maybe we should look into it, Scully—could be an X-File.”

She fixes him with a glare and puts her hand to the door handle. “I have other things to do today.”

“Aw, Scully. Don’t go.”

He reaches across her to remove her hand from the door and places it gently on the seat rest in between them. He gives her knuckles a little tap before letting go, and she watches her hand sitting there on the ugly purple fabric of the rented car, still a little warmer from his palm. She’s clinging to her irritation with white knuckles.

“Give me one good reason,” she says, “why I shouldn’t be at my mother’s stuffing myself with food as we speak.” 

He grins. “You can stuff yourself here, see.” He offers her the half-empty bag of Cheetos.

“You’ll have to try harder than that.”

She can see his brain working under the small wrinkle in between his eyebrows. They both know she’s not going anywhere, but some days, she gets the irrepressible urge to make him tell her why. 

“Because,” he says, drawing out the silence for suspense, “we’re exchanging worst first date stories.”

She raises an eyebrow. “What makes you think that?”

“Oh come on, we’ve been partners how long? Three years? And I’ve never told you the spaghetti story. We’ve missed out on an integral part of team building, Scully.”

His eyes are the brightest thing in the vicinity. Behind him, the sky has faded out to a dull grey. She relents, like they both knew she would. Her hand does not move from the place where he left it. 

“Fine, tell me the spaghetti story,” she says.

“Well, it was a dark and stormy night, circa—well, you know what, it was some point in the distant past. I was fifteen.”

“Oh no,” Scully says by reflex. She imagines him at fifteen, imagines him tripping over his feet and putting too much gel in his hair. She wonders if he’d been all lonely and strung out back then, or if that had come later. Maybe he’d charmed people into agreeing with him, given girls the shy smile and they’d thought he was a heartbreaker. Maybe he’d sat at lunch tables alone. She’s struck by how much she still doesn’t know.

“Oh no is right,” he says, grinning, oblivious to her small crisis. “Anyway, on this particular night, I’d gone out to eat with a couple of friends, and one of them was named Rose Patterman. I was in love with her. She was way too cool for me—smart, beautiful. I think she was in student government, but I can’t remember.”

“Did you ask her out?” 

“I tried to. My friends were in on it. They left early, so it was just me and her. And then,” he raised an eyebrow, “I spilled some of my drink on my seat so that I’d have to move across the booth and sit next to her.” 

“Oh, Mulder.” She laughs. 

“No, no, Scully, don’t laugh. I had the moves back then. I stretched out my arm, like this.” He gives a demonstration, stretching up until his fingers hit the ceiling and then slowly bringing his arm down around the back of her seat, not quite touching her shoulder.

She raises an eyebrow in defense and tries not to think about the single inch of space that separates his palm from resting against the back of her neck. She has a very clear memory of the way his fingers cupped that exact spot at a research station in Antarctica. It annoys her a lot that this move, the move every guy she’s ever dated has tried on her, is the most distracting thing about the conversation.

“Wow, that’s the exact look that she gave me too.”

Somehow, Scully doubts it. 

“You’re not going to tell me that it worked, are you Mulder?”

He sighs. “No, it didn’t. I could tell she wasn’t into it, so I tried to un-stretch, but she moved at the same time. My elbow got caught in her hoodie. I tried to yank it free, but when it finally came loose, it landed in her bowl of spaghetti. Got it all over her shirt.”

“Oh, God. That’s the worst.” 

This is clearly the reaction he hoped for. His eyes shine with delight. He slides his arm out from behind her, brushing his fingers against her shoulder in passing.

“No, it’s not. Once I tried to make out with a girl at the movies and the elderly lady behind us tapped me on the back of the head with her cane.”

“You’re making that up!”

“I’m not. I’m bad at love, Scully. Come on, it’s your turn.”

She bites her lip, trying to decide what to tell him. “Once I went out to dinner with a guy. I thought it was a date, but he just wanted to work on our group project.”

He winces. “Ouch. Once I went out with a classmate who wanted to sleep with me in the back of her parents’ minivan.”

“Did you?” she asks in horror.

He winces again. “Never kiss and tell?”

“Mulder!”

“I was twenty-one!” 

She can’t help laughing. “Okay, okay. Once I went over to a guy’s house and got food poisoning all over his couch.”

“Gross. Once I drank too much vodka and tripped on a girl’s dress.”

“Is that the best you can do? Once I snuck out to the mall to meet up with a guy, but it turned out Melissa had snuck out to meet him too and he’d got the timing mixed up. We both showed up at once.”

The face Mulder makes is a thing of beauty. She’s ugly laughing now, and he’s staring at her like he’s never seen her before. “Top that,” she challenges.

“Once I showed up to a blind date, and it was Frohike.”

“No!” 

“The Gunmen set me up! Trust no one, Scully.”

She leans against the steering wheel, still laughing. “Oh, was that when it became your official catchphrase?”

“Yeah, something like that.” His face is freer of worry than she’s ever seen it. Laugh lines gather around the corners of his eyes, and she wants to touch them for proof that he’s really happy, that his brows can unfurrow. 

“Once I met a girl and then took her grave digging the next day,” he says, still carried away by his delight.

Scully flushes when she realizes that he means her, three years ago. “That doesn’t count!”

“Maybe not, but once you met a guy and then immediately ran into his room and dropped  
your robe,” he says. He can’t quite look her in the eye when he says it.

She reaches over to shove him in the shoulder. “Asshole,” she says. “It wasn't immediately. And I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Ooh, swearing at me, Scully? Looks like I hit a nerve.”

She shoves him again for good measure, and now he’s trying to stop his laughter from spilling out of his mouth. 

“Fine,” she says. “Maybe I did a little.”

“Scully! You were hitting on me?” His mouth drops open. He goes through about three different expressions, each more mortifying than the last, until he finally settles on confusion.

She shrugs, still aware of her face burning, but there’s nothing she can do about that at this point, so she smiles and keeps her tone light. “Well, mostly I was worried about the bumps; anyone would have been. But the thought crossed my mind. I could have put on more clothing than I did.”

He gapes at her. She wants to roll her eyes. Did he honestly believe that she’s gone three years and never thought about it? Has he gone three years and never thought about it? She deeply regrets this whole conversation, and his wide-eyed stare is starting to irritate her. 

“Stop looking at me like that, Mulder. I thought we’d be working together for three months, not three years.”

“Wait, you thought—I mean, I did too. I was trying to scare you off. I thought you’d leave first chance.”

“I thought I’d disprove all your theories and call it a day.”

“God, Scully.” The way he says it is almost admiration, all low and gravely. She scrunches her toes against the floorboard. In the pit of her stomach, warmth flares up. She’s not going to apologize. She doesn’t think he wants her to, anyway, if the heat in his gaze is any indication. She’s going to get herself into trouble. Her heart keeps pulsing in her throat.

“Anyway,” she says, trying to sound unbothered. “It was years ago. This is a ridiculous conversation.”

He grins, flicks another seed at her. “It’s not ridiculous. Now, Scully, when did you realize you were desperately in love with me? Tell me more.” 

She rolls her eyes to hide the fact that if she flushes any deeper, she’ll probably turn into a tomato. “Mulder, I said I was trying to have a three-month fling with you back then, not get married.”

“Ouch.” He presses a hand to his heart in exaggerated sorrow. “Now I’m just a fling?”

She sighs and shakes her head. “No, now you’re a pest.”

“You’re breaking my heart here.” 

“Well, what can I say? Some things aren’t meant to be.”

“I guess not.”

He’s looking at her like he expects her to say something else, but what other mortifying secrets could she possibly have to offer? He is her best friend. He was there for all her other mortifying secrets. The way she’d once spilled soy sauce down the back of her skirt, the midnight call that she’d answered, “shut up,” the time she’d put salt instead of sugar into her coffee. She wants to shove him out of the car. But as the corner of his mouth quirks up and his eyes search her face with the warmest kind of anticipation, she finds to her horror that she also wants to pull him over by the collar and kiss him. 

She looks away abruptly, a little dizzy with the fear that he might see the thought cross her mind. “I think we should go home,” she says. “There’s nothing here.” She takes a breath to steady herself. 

It’s been a long week, and she’s tired and loopy, and that’s why she’s lost all common sense. She expects him to argue, but he doesn’t.

“Okay,” he says softly. “You’re the one driving.”

She reaches down to lever the seat forward, and he chuckles.

  
VI.

“Are you sure you’re okay, Dana?” Ellen’s voice is warm and concerned over the phone. Scully fiddles with the radio knob for a minute, trying to tune into the rock station that always grows fuzzier the farther she gets from the center of town.

“Yeah, why?”

“Well, I haven’t heard from you in a while. I was starting to get worried.”

Scully’s guilt sits uncomfortably in her gut. She hasn’t spoken to anyone in a while. She wonders if this is the kind of thing you can confess to a priest. 

“No, no, it’s okay,” she says, reassuring Ellen if not herself. “It’s just been a busy few months.” 

“I know how that is. This new job at the research center has me working late all the time.” As always, Ellen is all too willing to give her an out. This both relieves and frustrates Scully. “Hey, you know what we should do? Go out to Pirate’s Alley this weekend. Danny’s with his grandparents, and we need to catch up. It could be like old times.”

Scully bites her lip. In the background, she catches a single scratchy line of a song by Three Dog Night.

“Oh, Ellen, I don’t know. I’ve got some things to catch up on this weekend.”

“Like what?”

Scully thinks of her couch, of her tub. She thinks of her original plan, which was to bury herself in a past-due mindless romance paperback from the library, sleep, watch sitcoms until her eyes blur, sleep more, and wait until Saturday night to call Mulder to make sure he’s still all right. To make sure he still exists. Every time he almost dies in front of her, she has to either pretend it didn’t happen or stick to his side until the terrified, untethered feeling wears off. 

“That’s a long silence, Dana. Come on, you need to get out of that basement. We’ll get you a good cocktail and then I’ll pick out some hot tall guy for you.” 

Scully smiles in spite of herself. “We’ll get drinks, but I draw the line at matchmaking.”

“Why, are you waiting for Jesus to come back? When’s the last time you had a boyfriend, three years ago?”

“Just about.”

Ellen scoffs. “That’s too long.”

“I’ve been busy.”

The suspicious silence on Ellen’s end indicates deep thought. Scully is nearly sure she won’t like the question that comes next.

“Is there someone already?” 

“No,” Scully says, immediately defensive. She sighs. Allows her head to rest for an instant against the steering wheel, and thinks of the sharp, howling terror she’d felt in the instant she’d realized that someday she or Mulder might have to live in a world without each other. Before Modell, she hadn’t known that she was so afraid of leaving without him. That she was so afraid of leaving him behind. She’s not sure if this qualifies as having someone. “Yes,” she says, thinking of the way her fingers had found his in the hospital. Then, “I don’t know.”

“It’s not still that man you work with?”

Another silence.

“We’re just friends,” Scully says finally. 

“Hmm. You know how I know that’s not true?” Scully does not respond, but Ellen doesn’t seem to need a response. “You’ve told me about every other man who’s ever caught your attention. Remember Jack?”

Scully swallows. “Yeah, I remember Jack.”

She wishes that she didn’t. She never told Ellen that he died, that even if she had ended up with him, she’d still be alone now.

“You told me you wouldn’t marry him because he snores,” Ellen says, amused.

“That wasn’t the reason.”

To Scully’s own discomfort, she remembers that it had been most of the reason. She’d been looking for excuses.

“Point is, I’m your friend, and you tell me these things. And I tell you.”

“You didn’t tell me about Bobby,” Scully insists, unwilling to lose the argument. “Not for six months.”

On the other end of the line, Ellen sighs. It sounds kind of like a laugh. “Yeah, Dana. I know.”

Scully feels her brain trying to catch up. “I mean, you didn’t tell me about him at first because you weren’t sure if it was serious—this has nothing to do with me and Mulder. Correlation does not imply causation. You should know that.”

“I didn’t tell you because I was sure, and I knew you’d try to talk me out of it.”

Scully knows with a sinking feeling in her gut that this is true. “Ellen,” she starts, “I didn’t know—”

“I know you didn’t. I was overprotective because I knew I loved Bobby. From the first month, I knew.”

“You did?” Scully manages. She can’t imagine meeting someone and knowing, just knowing, that in five years you’d be married to them. Her curiosity wars with her desire to insist that it’s not possible for anyone to know, not for sure. 

“How?” she finally says.

“He was my best friend.”

“I was your best friend.”

Ellen laughs. “You can have more than one.”

Scully isn’t sure that she can. She thinks it would probably be healthier, on a psychological level, if she could. But she’s always aimed her love like a bullet to a target. It doesn’t stray from its mark. She can’t tell everyone her secrets, and she can’t kill for everyone. If she cared for everyone the way she cares for Ellen, then she’d be going to a godson’s birthday party every week, and she doesn’t have the time. But if she cared for everyone the way she cares for Mulder, there would be nothing left of her at all. 

“He cares more about his work than he does about me,” she says absently. If she doesn’t look at it head on, she can almost stand to say it. “It doesn’t matter if we…It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, Dana.” Ellen sighs. Scully has not wanted to be hugged in a long time, but right now, she thinks she wants to be hugged. “Are you sure?”

“He ditches me all the time. Forgets that I’m there and runs away to-to—” Scully realizes that she can’t give away any of the locations he’s run away to because if she does, she might be putting Ellen in danger. “Bermuda,” she says quickly. She’s getting weary of all the things she can’t tell anyone. 

She thinks Ellen knows, because she hums softly on the other end of the line. “Dana Scully, do you know what _you_ do when you love someone?”

“No,” Scully says. Because she doesn’t know, or maybe because if she admits that she does, there’s no going back. 

“You run away.”

“I don’t.” 

“You do.”

Scully swallows. “How do I stop?” she says. She says it so quietly that she thinks, hopes, that Ellen hasn’t heard it. 

There’s a silence. In the background, radio static crackles. “I don’t know,” Ellen says gently. 

And Scully doesn’t want to be sitting here in her car alone. She doesn’t want to go up the stairs to her apartment. She wants to forget the brush of Mulder’s fingers against hers and the sympathy in Ellen’s voice and the churning in her stomach as she realizes that there are people, maybe multiple people, who know her better than she knows herself. 

Outside, the sky has gone dark. Despite the streetlights, she can see a single star up above the parking lot and the little manicured trees. 

“Ellen?” Scully says. Her voice sounds more certain now.

“Yes?”

“I do have two best friends.”

“That’s a start.” Ellen’s voice is warm.

After a moment of comfortable silence, the phone clicks off. Ellen rarely bothers with lengthy farewells, which is something Scully has always appreciated about her. If you never say goodbye, then you can pick up the conversation right where you left off. You can pretend you said everything there was to say. But tonight, something about the evening feels unfinished. Scully sits in the car for another moment, watching a moth flutter against the windshield wiper. Its wings are pale and perfectly symmetrical. 

She’s dialing a different number before she can think about it. It rings once, twice, three times. Finally, there’s a scratchy noise as he picks up.

“Hey, Mulder,” she says. “It’s me.”

“Oh hey.” His voice is muffled and sleepy. She feels momentarily terrible for waking him up from an early night. “What’s going on, Scully?”

“Did I wake you?”

“No,” he lies. She can tell that he’s lying because when he lies, he enunciates. 

She takes a deep breath. “I’m hungry,” she says. “I was thinking of ordering a pizza, but I can’t eat it all.”

There’s a pause in which she can hear him shuffling something around in the background. When he speaks again, he sounds all the way awake. “Oh, well you should probably come over, then. I was just watching, uh. Animal Planet. There’s a show about electric eels. It’s fascinating stuff.”

She smiles into the receiver. “Okay. If you think it’s really that interesting.”

“Yeah, it’s a must-see.”

“I’m on my way then.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“Bye, Scully.”

She hangs up before they can get in a high school lover’s quarrel. _You hang up first._

When she turns her headlights on, the moth lifts its wings and flutters away, as though it had been waiting for an excuse to lift off all this time.

  
VII.

“Pendrell asked about you.”

“Hmmm?”

They’re driving through the corner of Georgia. Scully hadn’t expected there to be mountains in the corner of Georgia, but the road rises up and up ahead of them into densely wooded foothills. Trees bud in the new spring air, and to their right, huge white letters lean against the hillside. Scully half expects them to say Hollywood, but they don’t. They say “Look out.” Look out? The O has fallen over on its side.

She’d expect this kind of thing in Alabama. Huge signs by the side of the road promising that God will deliver, or that everyone is going to Hell. But this warning seems a little vague. 

“Scully?”

“Mhmmmm.”

She’s surprised Mulder doesn’t want to go and investigate the sign.

“I said Pendrell wanted to know what you were doing this weekend.”

“Did he?”

“Yeah.” Mulder sighs, the _you’re not paying attention to me_ sigh. She knows this sigh all too well. 

But the fact is, with the backdrop of flowering magnolias and pale blue mid-morning sky, Scully’s enjoying a moment of mental drift. It’s all too easy to imagine how the hillside letters appeared. She thinks of the painters in their messy T-shirts, and later, men using ropes to pull the letters up straight. Maybe it was a town project. Or maybe it was done in secrecy, in the dead of night. 

She wonders if this is the way Mulder sees things all the time. Always looking for the hidden truths behind every warning.

“Do you think you’d ever go out with him?” he says.

That gets her attention. Her eyes snap over to him, and she realizes that he’s watching her in open curiosity.

“Why? Are you his wingman now?”

She’s never thought of Mulder as anyone’s wingman. She can’t imagine him hyping anyone up in a bar. It’s not that he isn’t supportive, but his friendships run hot or cold. He’s either holding all of a person’s attention, hands reaching for a shoulder or an arm, eyes lit up with excitement as he explains the history of a street or the meaning of life—or he’s switched himself off until further notice.

“No,” Mulder says. When he doesn’t elaborate, she raises her eyebrow at him. He sighs. “Fine, he asked me to ask and I didn’t feel like I could say no.”

“What did you tell him?” she asks in mild curiosity. Half her attention has drifted back to the winding road ahead. Trust Mulder to get guilted into passing junior-high-esque messages to her from another man.

“Nothing, just that I didn’t think you had any plans.”

She smiles. “There’s where you’re wrong. I’m actually busy this weekend.”

She enjoys the brief moment of surprise as the expected script for this conversation gets suddenly thrown aside. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him chew his lip, thinking. She knows that an overture from any other man would probably be useless even if she did accept because his rueful smile would haunt her the whole time. But somehow, he hasn’t figured this out yet or he doesn’t want to acknowledge it. Either way, it’s become a rule that these things remain unspoken, so she waits as he searches for the right tone in which to ask the question.

“Got a hot date, Scully?” He chooses to make it a joke, which it is. Neither of them has had a hot date in what, embarrassingly, might be more than a year. He pokes her in the arm and she smiles indulgently.

“Yeah, Mulder. A date with the bar at my cousin’s wedding.”

His eyes might hold a hint of relief, or she could be imagining it. “You want me to call while she’s walking down the aisle? I could invent a monster or two for us to chase.”

_Yes_ , she thinks. Scully has never particularly cared for weddings. She thinks people use them as proof—proof that they love each other, proof that they’re at the right place in life to afford a dress and flower arrangements. As a scientist, she can appreciate wanting to hold on to the evidence. But on a personal level, that doesn’t make it any easier to sit through. Bill’s ceremony had been an hour and a half long. 

“Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary,” she says.

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure. My phone will be off.”

“The whole time?”

She gives him a glare, but her lips still threaten to twitch up. He raises his hands in surrender. This is a hostage negotiation, and all of cultured society is holding her captive.

“Okay, okay. You know, you could have asked Pendrell to that wedding. He’d have tripped over his feet to go with you.”

“I don’t want to go out with Agent Pendrell.” 

“You don’t?” 

His voice sounds so suddenly hopeful that it makes her heart clench. She doesn’t dare to look over at him. Her eyes stay fixed on the road, but she’s not really seeing it. They’ve passed the hillside warning sign now, and Mulder still hasn’t even given it a glance. 

“No,” she says. “Anyway, it would be premature to ask him to my cousin’s wedding. My whole family would be there. They’d terrify him.”

“Oh come on, it’s not that uncommon to go to these things with friends from work.”

“But Pendrell? I mean, can you picture his face when Bill and Charlie give him the third degree?”

Mulder laughs softly, probably picturing the panic face Pendrell had made last Friday just before he’d faux-casually mentioned that he and the other guys from the lab were going out. Then he’d stumbled over his words trying to ask her if she wanted to go. She’d told him she had to get an early start Saturday if she ever wanted to finish her paperwork. In the background, Mulder had worn an expression she couldn’t read.

“You could have asked me,” Mulder says. His tone is very even. It’s the hostage negotiation tone. She looks over at him, and he’s not wearing a panic face, but the longer she stays silent, the closer his face gets to the panic face. 

She bites her lip. “I didn’t think you’d want to come.”

“Why not?”

“Well, weddings don’t really seem like your scene,” she says in her very own hostage negotiation tone. 

“They could be. If you were there.”

There is a pause, as Scully tries very hard to pay attention to the white strip in the middle of the road, and Mulder slowly realizes that he’s just put his foot in his mouth.

“I mean,” he clarifies quickly, “We’re partners, it’s my job to make sure you don’t have to go through awkward social situations alone.”

Although Scully privately thinks that this moment qualifies as an awkward social situation, she has to admit that he’s right. It does feel better to be going through it with him. 

“Oh really, is that on the job description?” She smiles at him with the corner of her mouth.

“Yeah, right above ‘prove the existence of extraterrestrial life.’”

“Hmm. I would have thought that second one factored more heavily.”

She can feel him fidgeting. His hands reach for a bag of chips, then, failing to find one since he ate them an hour ago, come back to rest in his lap. “Hey, that’s not all I think about,” he says. She’d intended it as a joke, but there’s something serious poking out the edges of his tone.

“I didn’t say that.” 

She didn’t have to say it.

“I mean, I didn’t even mention that ominous sign back there. Give me some credit.”

“Oh, you wondered about that too?” 

He turns to her with an open smile that suggests she hung the stars in the sky. She can’t even look at that smile too closely. The sun filters down to paint parts of the car in yellow and parts in shadow. It catches in his hair and on his hands, until he looks like he might be made of light.

“Scully,” he says. “This is why you’re first on the list.”

She doesn’t believe this for a second. She has the facts—the missed phone calls and the near-death experiences, the trains and airplanes and getaway cars. But as she turns away from his too-earnest eyes and rolls down her car window to catch the cool morning air on her face, she wants to believe. 

“Fine,” she says, more softly than she’d intended. “You can come to the next one.”

“I can?”

“Yeah. But you have to dress nice.”

“I always dress nice.”

She looks at him.

“Suit and tie,” he promises. “Anything for you.”

She laughs quietly. Anything. 

Taking a breath, she slowly and casually rests her right hand on top of the seat rest between them, palm up. He looks down at it, then up at her face, then back down again. Catches on. Slowly and casually, he rests his palm on top of hers and links their fingers together. She can feel his pulse beat in his fingertips where they press against her knuckles. 

“Your hands are always freezing,” he complains. He captures her hand in both of his and brings it up to his mouth to blow warm air on it. “There,” he says. All of her feels warm. She wants to park the car and feel his breath on her mouth too. 

But this is not a new want, and Dana Scully is nearly immune to its power at this point. Somewhat immune. He sets her hand back on the seat rest, but keeps their fingers linked. She keeps driving, the sunlight finally reaches her side of the car, and he does not let go of her for miles.

  
VIII.

“Damn it, he's going to get away!”

Mulder slaps a palm against the steering wheel and lets out his breath in a hiss through his teeth. Ahead of them, a white Taurus weaves through highway traffic. Scully struggles to keep it in her line of sight as it switches lanes and speeds up. They’ve chased the man from a Houston gas station to a never-ending Texas highway that narrows as it approaches the coast.

Above them, the muddy grey sky mirrors the road and the tall half-dead grass on either side. They swim through a sea of silver Hyundais, white pickups, and Ford Tauruses of every color. 

“Well he’s right there, Mulder, he’s not getting off this road. Come on, speed up.”

The man in the white Taurus may or may not be able to read minds from a distance, but he’s certainly killed a gas station employee and a banker on a business trip. Probably others too, if Mulder’s old file is accurate. 

Mulder grunts and pushes down the pedal, cutting in front of a pickup driver who immediately lays on the horn and rides their tail. 

“I’m going eighty!” he protests. Scully isn’t sure if he’s talking to her or the pickup driver. Their rental car rumbles in protest.

“Well, go faster. I’m pretty sure eighty is the normal driving speed here.” 

Scully grips the side of her door as they swerve around yet another white pickup. Her stomach lurches suddenly, and she puts a hand to it. She tries to ignore Mulder’s split-second glance at her. 

“Scully?”

“Look, up ahead. Shit, he’s getting off the main road. Turn there, Mulder!”

“Where?” 

“There! Look, there’s an exit.”

“I don’t see an—oh.”

He jerks the steering wheel to the right again, they cut in front of a woman in a minivan who honks and sticks a finger out the window, and Scully’s stomach heaves as they spin into a sharp right turn. Ahead of them, she sees the back of the Taurus. Its wheels whirl up dust and sand. Scenery flashes by: scruffy bushes, short weathered palm trees, a collection of mobile homes with beach chairs on the front porches. Their engine rumbles so loudly that a couple of women come out of their houses to look.

Scully spots the flash of a yellow sundress, and then a bump in the road shifts her in her seat, and her ears start to ring. 

Mulder’s eyes are set on the car up ahead. Now they’re speeding down a dirt road at 70 miles an hour, and there’s no way this guy is losing them. She clutches the door handle, white knuckled, and bites her lip hard.

“Scully?”

His voice echoes like they’re in an auditorium or the inside of a conch shell.

“Keep driving,” she says, praying that blood won’t start dripping from her nose. That’s just what she needs, to pass out while they’re chasing a murderer. 

“Shit. He’s turning again, hold on.”

She grips the door harder as the car swerves again. It hits one last terrible bump and then something softer. Her vision swims, and for a second, she thinks she must be hallucinating the way the ground moves to her right. But then she sees the familiar foam of waves hitting the shore and realizes they’ve made it to the beach front. The Taurus kicks up sand in front of them, leaves them behind, but their own car wheels spin uselessly, propelling them no further. Scully can feel the wheels still whirling as the front of the car sinks lower. 

Mulder throws his door open, and Scully grapples with the handle to her own, trying to summon control of her own fingers. Her head feels like it’s on a tilt-a-whirl. She can see Mulder’s black coat flapping out behind him as he runs. The grey of the sea as a backdrop.

For a moment, time slows, and he’s framed perfectly by the front window, a silent film in shades of black and white. Then she manages to free herself from the car and stumble forward; her hand fumbles for her gun, and the wind whips at her hair. 

A gunshot rips through the air, and then she’s running. Her shoe catches in the sand. She pitches forward. Her hands hit the ground, grains catching in her fingernails. A single drop of blood stains the sand as her vision begins to darken.

All she can think, illogically, is that he’s going to leave her behind. The man in the Taurus will kill him and she won’t be there to stop it. 

“Scully!”

He’s yelling her name from a distance, but she can’t get up. Footsteps thump against the sand, and warm hands close on her arms. 

“He’s getting away,” she manages.

She’s hauled to her feet and pulled against him. Her head still spins, so she rests it against his chest for support. Her fingers clutch his arms even as she tries to make herself let go. Her knees don’t feel steady; he’s taking most of her weight. He smells like sweat and bad cologne. 

She licks her lips and tries again. “Mulder, you have to find him.”

“Shhh.” She can feel the origin of his voice where it rumbles in his throat. “He’s not going far. Only one way to drive.”

They head back to the car slowly. He opens the passenger side door since the wind has slammed it shut again. Carefully, he sets her inside. The water and the sky are two different entities now, but she still has to blink a few times before she can see the distinct features of his face. 

He leans on the car door like she’s sapped his strength as well as her own. His eyebrows are pulled together and his eyes have grown wide with fear. Embarrassment starts to emerge from where Scully had left it when she’d nearly passed out. She realizes one of her feet is bare now and scrunches her toes in the sand.

He pulls out a phone and he’s saying something into it about the white Taurus, the need for backup. Dazed, she watches his mouth move but hears very little of what he’s saying.

He hangs up the phone and kneels in the sand next to her. 

“They’re on their way, Scully. Are you okay?”

She isn’t sure what to say. She let the guy get away. She’s probably dying of cancer if the embarrassment doesn’t kill her first. 

“I’m fine, Mulder.”

“No, you’re not. You’re shaking. Here.”

He takes off his coat and gently wraps it around her shoulders, pulling the edges together until she’s blanketed in it. His fingers brush her arms and stay there for a moment. He seems reluctant to let go.

“Thanks,” she mumbles. “It’s just the. When the car bumped up and down. It messed with my balance, I guess. The doctor said that might happen.”

He worries his bottom lip between his teeth and adjusts the collar of his coat so that it’s turned up against the wind, shielding her. His palm hangs warm against her collarbone. 

“Well, don’t feel too bad,” he says. “You made it farther than the car did.”

She tries to summon up a laugh but only manages a small smile. Still, his lips curve up in automatic response. Maybe the cancer won’t kill her and the embarrassment won’t. Maybe she’ll die in automatic response to the wash of sadness in his eyes whenever he looks at her these days. Maybe they’ll mirror each other back and forth until she goes. 

He looks away, and she’s relieved mostly. There’s a tiny part of her mind that doesn’t care why he’s looking at her, as long as he’s looking, but she shuts that part down with a practiced sigh.

“Do you think they’ll get here before he leaves?” she says.

Mulder stands up. He squints his eyes against the wind and looks out into the distance, past the mostly empty beach front, to the houses on stilts at the horizon. Even from where Scully sits, she can see that the car has long since vanished. All that’s left is lighted buoys riding the waves and tracks from where car tires have roughed up the sand. 

“I don’t know.”

Scully summons up the strength to stand so she can stand beside him. She leans on the door, until he pulls her towards him so she can lean on his shoulder instead. His arm does not go around her waist, but she can feel the twitch of his fingers against her hip as he thinks about it. They watch the rise and fall of the waves.

“We should call a tow truck,” she says.

“Yeah, we should. I didn’t think of that.”

But he makes no move to pull his phone back out from his pocket. 

“Scully?” he says.

“Yeah?”

“If he could read my mind, he’d have known about you. He’d have known that I was worried about you, and he’d have used it against me.”

“Mulder, we never proved he could do that.”

“But if he could.”

She sighs. She sticks her hands further into the depths of his coat as the wind stings her face.

“I’m fine, you know. You don’t have to worry.”

He turns towards her. His arms are crossed in his shirtsleeves, and she watches his tie flap, trying not to look at his eyes. Her shoulder’s hitting him about mid-chest now. 

“What do you mean, I shouldn’t worry? I’m your friend. It’s not something I can turn on and off.”

“Well, maybe…” she starts. From the betrayed look on his face, he knows how the rest of the sentence would have gone. _Maybe you should try_. She scrunches her toes in the sand and tries to think of a way to say any of it. To say that there will be a life for him, when she’s gone. To tell him that he has to detangle himself from her. She will not be the next Samantha of his life, and her death will not be another mystery to solve. Her death will be her own.

She tries to imagine what she’d feel like if he was going to die, feels her stomach churn at the thought of it, and sets the idea aside. 

“This can’t happen again,” she says finally. “You can’t spend our investigations looking back at me. You have to move forward.”

“I am moving forward. But I’m taking you with me or we’re not going anywhere.”

“Mulder, I can’t go with you forever.”

“How do you know that?” 

His voice is so quiet and earnest that the wind nearly blows it away. She takes a breath, leans her whole body into him, and wraps her arms around his waist. His fingers cling to the back of the coat she’s wearing, and his chin drops to the top of her head. He wraps himself around her so easily that she thinks he must have been waiting for it. Between them, her breath heats the small space where his shirt collar opens up to his neck. 

“No one lives forever,” she murmurs.

“You could be the first.”

He traces the small of her back, where the red ouroboros tattoo sits, buried underneath his coat and her suit and her shirt. She shivers and settles herself more closely against him. The waves pound at the shore behind his right shoulder, but she closes her eyes so that she doesn’t see anything except the red warm space behind her eyelids, and she doesn’t feel anything except his chest rising and falling with the tide of his breath.

“Stay with me,” he whispers. “You have to promise.”

“I’m here.” 

It is not the answer that he wants, but his fingers tighten in the folds of the coat as though he can hold her on this earth through force of will alone. Maybe he can. If anyone could believe in a cure hard enough to materialize one, it would be him. The ocean fades to a white fuzz in the background, and little rain droplets start to brush against her cheeks. Later, they will call the tow truck. They will sit in the car waiting for backup as the rain starts to pelt against the windows, and then they will take a taxi forty-five minutes back to their motel; they will sit in silence as she falls asleep against his shoulder and he tries not to fidget too hard.

But in this moment, Scully listens to the thump of his heartbeat and pretends that it can sustain them both. She keeps her eyes closed and knows without having to check that his are closed too. They are two mirrors pointing inwards. If one topples, the other will crash to the ground. 

  
IX.

He’s tapping the glass of the passenger side window. Morse code, maybe, or the beat to a particularly repetitive rock song. She can’t decide. She’s been watching the house out the window for three hours now, but mostly she’s been watching the sun set and watching his fingers tap on the glass. The final rays of the sun spill between them, shifting as he fidgets.

They’ve got a van this time—one of those ugly white service vans with the name of a cable company on the side. Scully thinks that she and Mulder are the world’s least convincing cable installers, that anywhere they go, they look like twin mannequins at the suit store, and that they really should have put more effort into this if they wanted anyone to come out of that very beige front door.

She’s glad Mulder didn’t think of it, though. She wouldn’t have wanted to wear overalls. 

She takes a sip of her tea, and Mulder stops tapping to look at her, as though the slurp was a form of language and he’s the attentive translator. He looks at her a lot these days. She can’t say if he spends more time trying to translate her than he did in the beginning, but she notices it more. She thinks maybe it’s his way of checking her pulse, making sure she’s still beside him. 

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“I know you don’t think we’re going to find anyone here.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She didn’t really have to, and his soft chuckle says as much. 

“Thanks for humoring me,” he says. He reaches over to steal her tea and take a long sip from it, and she grabs his arm in protest. She tries to stop him from draining the cup, but she’s not pulling hard enough to move his arm, and he tips back the whole thing.

She smiles and shakes her head, letting go of his sleeve. 

“You know, you have to go buy me more tea now.”

“Hey, I bought it the last time and then someone drank both cans.”

“Yes, but it’s a Saturday night, and you called me—out of a bath, I might add—so you have to buy the refreshments.”

“What if the invisible assassin shows up?”

“Mulder, if the invisible assassin shows up then neither one of us will be able to see him anyway.”

“But we could see his footsteps.”

She can’t help the grin on her face. It’s good to be arguing about invisible people instead of her impending death, or his impending death, or past lovers, or anything in the realm of the mundane. 

“Mulder.” And she doesn’t even have to say the rest. 

He looks at her lazily, smile creeping onto his face—he’s as happy as she is. Mirrors. Joy is a slower emotion in him. Easier to feel sadness or restlessness. Usually by the time she catches his smiles, they’re halfway faded already. But there it is, the most elusive thing she’s ever chased. 

She wants to reach up and put her finger in the curve of his bottom lip to see if she can catch it on her fingertips. In fact, her hand is reaching out for him without her permission when he goes suddenly still.

“Shit.”

“What?”

She wants to ask him about bee stings, but then he’s tugging on the sleeve of her jacket and cramming his lanky body through the gap in seats to get to the back of the van. 

“Someone’s coming out, get down.”

She throws herself through the gap after him, and there’s a bit of a scuffle as she bangs her calf on a pipe or a wooden plank in the storage area. She kicks it unceremoniously out of her way as she wriggles down against the floor. It hits Mulder in the leg, and he swears as he rolls over to avoid it. He winds up nearly on top of her, his forearms braced on either side to avoid smothering her.

“Ouch, Scully, that hurt.”

From this distance, his breath fans her face, warm and sweet. She gets a close-up of the same curve of his lips that she was studying earlier. When she drags her gaze back up to his eyes, they’ve gone wide, pupils dilated. In her medical opinion, he’s not thinking about their suspect. 

“Sorry,” she says, but it comes out a little breathless, and she doesn’t sound very sorry at all.

His whole warm body hovers above her—his knees pressed against the outside of her thighs, his tie falling down onto her chest. She’s completely boxed in by him, pressed up against the floor of the van. He looks like he’s seen the last bit of pie at their favorite diner. When he bites his lip, that’s the last straw.

“Mulder?”

“Yeah,” he says, but it’s not really a question. Instead of pulling back, he leans even closer into her space; his breath brushes her lips—and then a gunshot shatters the quiet.

Scully nearly groans. For one moment, she thinks about pulling him down by the tie and kissing him anyway. She thinks that, if she has to take a bullet, it might be worth it to finally, finally press him against her and devour him whole. First it was the bee, and now it’s the invisible assassin, but if she does not kiss him, she might die of that alone. 

He lets out a mournful sigh, rolls out of her space, and kicks open the door.

They leap out together, guns sweeping out in front of them in unison. If he brings this up over takeout tonight, she’ll kill him.

  
X.

He’s just gotten out of his sling. Over lunch break, she examined the arm (touched it, trailed her fingers down to his elbow, tried to suppress a genuine blush the likes of which she hasn’t bothered with since around 1996). When she told him it was fine to take off the sling, as long as he was careful, he grinned at her so brightly that she had to look away. 

So now they’re sitting in her car, and he’s driving her home. He was so excited to drive again. It’s 6 PM, and the traffic in DC is awful. Cars honk at him for not driving faster. She’s pleased that he’s taking her advice to go easy on the arm, even if the lady in the Honda behind him isn’t as thrilled. 

Maybe the speed is due to her advice, or it could be the fact that while he driving, he’s also trying to tell her a story about menacing cloud spirits seen in Iowa forty years ago. Behind him, winter evening sunlight filters from between pink and yellow clouds. She doesn’t think any of it looks the least bit menacing, and she has trouble believing that anyone could. 

But she nods and smiles and raises her eyebrow in the right places. It’s not that she’s not paying attention. Well, all right, she’s not paying attention. Instead, she is watching the steady rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, the pulse in his neck, and the new brightness in his eyes. He hasn’t looked this alive all year. All year, he’s been drifting through bad exes and bad information, frustrating leads and exhausting cases. And she’s been trying to row the boat through waves and waves of red tape. It feels like they’ve been swimming in place.

But a month ago, he kissed her. She tries not to think too hard about it—but she does think about it anyway. She examines it from every angle. The lighting. The look in his eyes afterwards. The tone of his voice. Plenty of people kiss each other on New Year’s. She once kissed Ellen on New Year’s, both of them laughing at each other and mocking kiss technique. Plenty of people do it, and it doesn’t mean anything. 

It’s not that they don’t love each other. It’s not that she doesn’t want to kiss him, or that she thinks he doesn’t want to kiss her. But it’s like the file you shove in the back of the cabinet when you can’t stand to look at the details straight on. You know that the file exists. You have a good idea what it contains. You never take it out again. 

Except he did take it out again. And so now she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do with it.

“Scully?”

While she was watching his lips move, not taking in a single word, he gradually slowed his words until there were no more at all. They’re sitting at the last stop light before her apartment. He taps his fingers on the wheel.

“Yeah, sorry. Just thinking.”

“Those looked like some pretty interesting thoughts. Care to share them with the class?”

She straightens her coat. Mulder asks her more questions than any other man she’s ever known. Some days, it’s like stepping into a warm bath. Other days, it’s like avoiding a volley of innocently thrown snowballs. “Thinking about dinner.”

From the way his mouth twists, she can tell he knows it’s a lie. But he doesn’t press the issue.

“Ah, the age-old conundrum. You don’t want takeout?”

What he means is, _do you want to accidentally order too much takeout and then ask me to come up and finish it with you?_ Takeout has been a common excuse these days. 

“Oh. No, not really,” she says, trying to sound absent. If she asks him up, she will also ask him why he kissed her, and then they’ll both have to stare at the fine print of that file. 

They pass the stoplight, and a BMW honks for Mulder to drive faster instead of staring at her face. Scully silently agrees.

They drive for a few moments in silence, and then they’re passing the little manicured lawn with its manicured trees and pulling into the parking lot of her apartment. He eases into a spot, parks, and studies her again.

She smiles at him. The smile is not a real smile. It’s the smile that tells him to keep his distance, or they’ll both end up regretting it. She knows that he understands this language. Even if he hadn’t studied psychology, he’s studied her for long enough that every gesture has its distinct classification. Because she’s studied him for just as long, she knows that his answering smile is full of the restless anxiety that he will later try to exorcise by thumping his basketball on the floor of his apartment until his neighbors yell at him to stop. Mulder’s poor neighbors. 

“Remember what I said about the arm,” she says. “Be careful with it.”

She reaches out and brushes his shoulder with her fingertips. She means it to be a goodbye. She means it to say that she’ll call him tomorrow to make sure he is being careful. But her fingers grasp his shirt for a moment before letting go. She turns for the door handle, swallowing down the question for the millionth time this week. _Why did you_ —

“Scully, how long are we going to do this?” His voice sounds as desperate as she feels.

She freezes. When she looks at him, there’s an expression in his eyes that she recognizes. It’s a reckless spark—terrified and fearless at the same time. This must be the look he gets before he jumps on trains. 

“Mulder, I don’t know what you—”

He leans over and kisses her. She makes a small sound of surprise against his mouth, but his warm hands cup her jaw and she’s leaning into it before she can think. This is not the New Year’s kiss. _Be careful_ does not apply here. Her fingers grasp at his collar, at the back of his neck, trying to pull him closer when he’s already as close as he can get. His breath is hot against her mouth as he breaks away for half a second before diving back in. She feels dizzy with it, like they’ve both jumped off the railing and onto the moving train this time. His fingers tangle in her hair; she feels their path like fire.

The cup holder jabs into her side, and she pulls back. Her forehead rests against his. His pulse thumps wildly against her thumb where it lingers against the soft underside of his jaw. Her own heart jabs the same relentless rhythm into her ribcage. It feels like adrenaline, like the rush of half-fear, half-thrill that never goes away no matter how long she spends running into danger.

“I told you that the world doesn’t end,” he says softly, a little breathless. The wonder in his voice might melt her down to her bones.

“I believe you,” she says. 

He laughs, and she feels the breath across her lips, the ghost of his mouth. “That’s a first.”

From this close, his eyes are bright as the sun glinting off the ocean. She can see the tiny lines at the corners when he smiles. She reaches up to touch the corner of that smile, feels his almost imperceptible shiver when she does. The world hasn’t ended, but it’s quaked beneath her feet. It’s knocked her off balance. 

She laughs shakily, then pulls back. “Mulder, I can’t—I have to.”

She stops. She doesn’t know what she has to do. Kiss him again? Leave? Her heart continues to hammer in her chest, only now it’s starting to feel more and more like panic. Once she and Melissa had snuck into her father’s office and stolen the half-empty glass bottle of whiskey he kept safe in the back of his lowest desk drawer. They’d taken turns with it and then replaced the missing volume with root beer. Her heart had felt like it was only expanding, not contracting. It feels the same way now. 

“Okay,” Mulder says. His eyes are their very own storm of hope and fear and acceptance. She wants to invite him up, to do anything, anything to see the hope win out. 

If she invites him up, she’ll kiss him again. Once is a joke, twice is a bad idea, three times is the point of no return. 

He trails his fingers down her arm, and then lets her go. He’s waiting on her, she realizes. She wonders how long he’s been waiting on her, how many of their separate bad decisions were inspired by the waiting, and whether she can think about that without unraveling the whole of their partnership, their seven-year friendship, their accidental arranged marriage. 

She takes one breath, then another. “I have to go,” she says more steadily. 

He nods, disappointed, but she can tell, not surprised. 

She reaches for the car door to flee the scene. He watches her all the way to her apartment door, and then once she’s stumbled up the stairs to her apartment and fumbled her way inside, she sees his car out the window, still sitting outside with the headlights turned on. After a few minutes, he drives away.

  
XI.

She can’t sleep. It would be better if she could turn her brain off and then turn it back on again, but she’s spent a restless few hours staring up at the ceiling and replaying the whole conversation. Replaying his mouth on hers. The initial shock of longing, and then the panic. 

At 5:15, she gives up. She throws off her covers, gets out of bed, and puts on her running shoes. She’s out the door before she can think about it.

She makes it to the sidewalk outside, and then she breaks into a run. She runs and runs and runs. Her side clenches up with the effort of breathing, and her air comes in huge freezing gasps. She’s forgotten to put on a jacket. Around her, early morning lights start to come on in the pleasant two-story houses of the neighborhood. A streetlight buzzes and crackles with energy up above her head. Her breath fans out in a cloud in front of her face.

Finally, when her legs feel numb and worn, she slows. She thinks of the runs she used to take around campus just before she first got accepted into the FBI academy. Back then, nearly a decade ago, she’d been running to take her mind off a new career direction. She wonders what would have happened to that Dana Scully if she’d listened to her doubts. If she’d become a doctor, started work at a hospital or clinic and then settled down one day in a house like the ones around her. 

She would never have been abducted. She would never have watched her sister die. She would never have met the Flukeman or the liver-eating mutant or the full variety of terrifying parasites and insect-related mishaps that have characterized the past seven years. 

She would never have bought her favorite coat; she would never have acid-burned her favorite pumps. She would never have held a gun; she would never have watched Superstars of the Superbowl. She would never have saved anyone from anything more harrowing than a sudden heart attack or a bad case of food poisoning. 

She would never have met Mulder at all. The thought sends an unexpected pang through her stomach that makes her stop in the middle of the sidewalk. She thinks of that life, of never meeting him. Of going an entire lifetime of checking pulses without ever feeling his pulse against her fingers. Of hearing a million other voices over the phone and never hearing his. Of walking through a million crowded rooms and feeling alone in every one of them. She hadn’t even realized that feeling was loneliness before she’d been sitting arm-to-arm with him on his couch one afternoon, trying to remember it.

If there ever was a point of no return, she’s passed it long ago. 

It’s a new kind of terror that possesses her on her run back home. She’s terrified that he doesn’t know. 

When she makes it up her stairs, she calls him. It’s 6:30 AM. He picks up immediately.  
“Scully?” His voice sounds terrified too.

“I’m fine,” she tells him. For the first time in their shared history, she believes it. “I need to see you.”

  
XII.

She’s driving this time. She’s showered and put on a green turtleneck and her favorite coat. She feels remarkably like herself for the zero hours of sleep that she’s running on. In the passenger seat, he keeps stealing glances at her, but he’s been quiet this morning. She can tell he’s trying to figure out what she means, what all of it means—his eyebrows furrow like he’s solving a puzzle. He hasn’t shaved, and it makes his face look softer and sleepier. 

The first winter rays of sunlight are just stealing over the hood of the car, and around them, the highway is almost deserted. 7:45 on a Saturday, and they’re winding their way into Virginia hills, past a gas station and the tall yellow sign of a Waffle House.

He hasn’t asked her where they’re going, which is good, because Scully doesn’t know. All she knows is that if she drives long enough, she’ll get the nerve to say what she needs to say. If enough miles pass underneath them, eventually they have to be changed by those miles. Eventually, she has to become a braver woman.

The car is very quiet. Earlier, Mulder fiddled with the radio for a few fruitless minutes before turning it off. Now he sits there in a grey sweater with a bedhead that she knows isn’t from his actual bed because if she hasn’t slept, then it’s very unlikely he has either. The bags under his eyes seem to agree with her.

She can’t stop glancing over, trying to drink all of him in before she says what she has to say and then things are different. No going back.

“Scully,” he says finally. “About last night.” He winces, then starts again. “About when I kissed you. Was that—were you just curious? I mean, I understand if that’s what it was.”

The terror in his eyes might break her. The way he’s trying to pretend it doesn’t feel like life or death. It’s like looking in a mirror. It’s like driving down a highway that never, ever ends. 

Suddenly, she can’t stand him not knowing for a single second longer. She pulls over to the side of the road and parks in the dirt. 

“Scully?”

“Get out of the car.”

“What?”

But she’s already exiting the driver’s side. The tall grass brushes against her thighs as she rounds the car, and she hears the rustle from the passenger side as he steps out too. There was no question of whether he would follow her. When he’s standing in front of her, she has to look up to meet his eyes. She’s often thought they were the most beautiful thing about him, but they have a lot of competition. In the early morning sunlight, he looks like an old photograph, all of him washed in shades of yellow and grey. If she could see his soul, she thinks it would match. 

He tilts his head to look at her, a silent question.

She steps into his space, presses him back against the car, and kisses him. After a moment of wooden shock, he wraps his arms around her waist and kisses her back for all he’s worth. She doesn’t bother to breathe; she’s too hungry for the warmth of his mouth. She has to stand on tiptoe to get to him, which both enchants and frustrates her, until he leans down and presses her closer, enveloping her completely. He smells like himself and nothing else. She thinks that after this moment ends, she may miss it for the rest of her life. For a long time, they stand there, wrapped around each other while the first of the morning’s traffic flashes by on the highway.

Finally, he pulls away. His smile is soft, and early-morning clouds still drift in his eyes. She thinks of coffee and of his bed, of waking up to this Mulder. Her heart aches with how much she wants to live that moment.

“Can I tell you a secret?” she says, before she loses her nerve.

“Anything.” His low voice, still scratchy, sends a shiver down her spine.

“Remember that time I told you I wanted a three-month fling with you?”

He raises his eyebrows. “That was cruel, Scully. It’s only been etched into my brain ever since.”

She wants to apologize, but if she does, she’ll never get the next part out. It seems both too obvious and too much of a secret to say out loud. “I didn’t really want it to be a fling,” she tells him.

“Oh,” he says. He blinks at her like she’s just told him she believes in the aliens after all. “That long?”

“Shut up, Mulder.”

He grins and leans down to kiss her again. His joy could swallow the world, she thinks. Or maybe it’s her own. She feels tethered to the earth by his arms only; if he let go, she might drift up towards the sky. But he won’t let go. He’s only ever let go of her when she’s told him to, and right now, she thinks she may let him kiss her for the rest of her life.

Highway noise rushes on in the background, but Scully has never cared less. In this moment, pressed against him like a talisman, she’s stopped thinking about the road at all.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want the same story as this fic, done better and in five minutes or less, please listen to Drive by Wild Club and Angela by the Lumineers (stole my title from a line that felt very Scully to me because at NO point will I write an original title; that's what moody indie pop was created for). If you're reading this, ily and I hope your December is going better than mine!


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